Springtime and Other Essays Part 6

A much simpler instrument known as the tabor pipe {85} was in general use in the twelfth century. Its essential feature is that it has but three holes, so that it can be played with one hand, thus leaving the other hand free to accompany the melody on the tabor or small drum hung round the neck of the performer or from his wrist. Its working compa.s.s is an octave and three notes, though two shrieking higher notes can be produced. The French form of three-holed pipe is known as the galoubet.

There was also a ba.s.s galoubet, which is known from the figures in Praetorius (1618), and from one solitary instrument which has escaped destruction. Mr Galpin has a copy of it in his great collection, and I have had the pleasure of playing on it. The instruments of the genus recorder have been finally beaten in the struggle for life by the flageolet, and perhaps especially by the true flute, which Mr Galpin, for the sake of clearness, distinguishes as the cross flute. It seems to be a mistake to consider the flute as a modern instrument, as it was popular about the year 1500, and is shown in an illuminated MS. of 1344 preserved at Oxford.

The flute as used about 1600 had but six holes, but the D# key for the little finger of the right hand came into use about the end of the seventeenth century, and about 1800 several keys had been added to enable the performer to play with less cross-fingering.

Dolmetsch, _op. cit._, p. 458, claims that although the one-keyed flute of the eighteenth century has a weak tone, it is more beautiful than the modern flute.

He adds that a flautist has recently studied this instrument, guided by Hotteterre le Romain's book (1707), and can play more perfectly in tune than "he ever did before upon a highly improved and most expensive modern instrument."

The concert-flute of the present day is an elaborate instrument covered with keys, and it has, I believe, been suggested that its tone is injured by this elaboration. Ba.s.s flutes have been made, one 3 ft. 7 ins. in length is mentioned, whose lowest note was an octave below middle C.

Shawms. {87}

The next cla.s.s of wind instruments dealt with by the author is that of which the oboe and ba.s.soon are typical. Mr Galpin refers to a reed-pipe with which I am very familiar; it is made from a dandelion stalk pinched flat at one end. Its principle is that of the oboe. I well remember admiring its tone as a child, and lamenting its very brief life, for it soon got spoiled. The reed of serious musical instruments is made of two pieces of cane which are flat at the free or upper end and terminate below in a tube which fits on to the instrument. This is an ancient type of instrument, for the Roman _tibia_ is believed to have been played with the "double reed," _i.e._ of oboe-type. I may here be allowed to quote from my _Rustic Sounds_, p. 5: "The most truly rustic instrument (and here I mean an instrument of polite life-an orchestral instrument) is undoubtedly the oboe. The ba.s.soon runs it hard, but has a touch of comedy and a strong flavour of necromancy, while the oboe is quite good and simple in nature and is excessively in earnest; it seems to have in it the ghost of a sun-burnt boy playing to himself under a tree, in a ragged s.h.i.+rt unb.u.t.toned at the throat." A figure is given (Galpin, p.

159) of a goat playing on a shawm {88} from a carving of the twelfth century at Canterbury. The name is believed to be derived from _calamaula_, a reed-pipe, which was corrupted to _chalem-elle_ and then to _shawm_. Shawms were made of various sizes, from the small treble instrument, one foot long, to the huge affair, six feet in length. The name Howe-boie, _i.e._ probably Haut-bois, was applied to the treble instrument as early as the reign of Elizabeth; while the deeper-toned instruments retained the name shawm. The ba.s.soon is only a ba.s.s oboe rendered less c.u.mbrous by the tube being bent sharply on itself. A tenor ba.s.soon, known as the oboe da caccia, or teneroon, also existed, and if my memory serves me right, Mr Stone rescued one of these instruments from the band of a London boys' school. A teneroon of Mr Galpin's is shown at p. 168 of his book, where it appears to be about seven-tenths of the size of the ordinary ba.s.soon.

[Picture: Plate VII. Pibcorn or Horn-pipe]

The next cla.s.s of wind-instrument is that of which the clarinet is the modern representative. It has a rich but somewhat cloying tone, and, to my thinking, none of the mysterious charm of the oboe. It is characterised by a single vibrating plate or reed, and the current of air from the performer's mouth pa.s.ses between it and an immovable surface of wood. In our country this type of reed was found in a most interesting instrument, the horn-pipe {89a} or pibcorn, which is said to have existed in Wales as late as the nineteenth century. One of these curious instruments is in the possession of the Society of Antiquaries, and is shown in Plate VII. It was given to the Society by Daines Barrington, who describes it in the Society's _Archaeologia_ for 1779. In a Saxon vocabulary of the eighth century the word _Sambucus_ (_i.e._ elder-tree) is translated _swegelhorn_. Now the word _swegel_ was applied to the _tibia_ or leg-bone; it is therefore of remarkable interest to find that, according to an old Welsh peasant, the tibia of a deer should be the best tube for the pibcorn. {89b} This name, which means pipe-horn, is very appropriate, since the tube of the instrument bears at either end a cow's horn. To the upper one the performer applied his mouth. He had no means of regulating the reed as a clarinet or oboe-player has; the reed was left to its own sweet will, as is also the case with the reeds in another ancient instrument-the bagpipe, to which a few words must be given.

Mr Henry Balfour believes that both these instruments came to us with the Keltic migration from the East. Or, as Mr Galpin suggests, we may owe the bagpipe to Roman soldiers, "for the _tibia utricularis_ was used in the Imperial army." It is quite a mistake to suppose that the bagpipe is in any special way connected with Scotland. Illuminated missals of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries show how common the bagpipe was in England. But the Scots must at least have a share of the credit of preserving the bagpipe from extinction; and the same may be said of another Keltic race, the Breton, in whose land I have heard the bagpipe accompanied by a rough kind of oboe.

Mr Galpin tells me a pleasant story of a bagpipe hunt in Paris. He discovered, in a shop, an old French musette (bagpipe), the chanter or melody-pipe of which was missing. He did not buy it until in a two days'

hunt all over Paris he discovered the lost chanter, when he returned to the first shop, triumphantly carried off the musette, and thus became the owner of this rare and beautiful instrument.

The drone, which forms a continuous ba.s.s to the "chanter," was not an original character of the bagpipe, but appeared soon after the year 1300.

A second drone "was added about the year 1400, for it is seen in the ancient bagpipe belonging to Messrs Glen of Edinburgh," which bears the date 1409.

The Horn and Cornett.

The horn takes its name from the cow's horn, out of which the instrument was made. The resemblance includes the tapering bore of this instrument, and also the fact that it is curved. {90} In the metal instruments, made in imitation of the natural horn, we find a curvature of about a semi-circle, as in the seventeenth century hunting horn (Galpin, p. 188).

While in the horn of the early seventeenth century shown on the same plate, the tube is curved into many circular coils.

[Picture: PLATE VIII. I, 2, 3, 4, 5. Cornetts. 6. Serpent. 7. Ba.s.s Horn.

8. Ophicleide. 9. Keyed Bugle]

The cornett, {91} which was blown like a horn or trumpet, seems to have been successful in mediaeval times, because a workable scale was so much more easily attainable with it than in the ordinary trumpet. In Norway a goat's horn pierced with four or five holes stopped by the fingers is still in use as a rustic instrument. This is in fact a cornett which, as early as the twelfth century, was made of wood or ivory, and had a characteristic six-sided form. It seems to have been popular, and Henry VIII. died possessed of many cornetts. We hear, too, of two _Cornetters_ attached to Canterbury Cathedral; and the translators of the Bible gave it a place in Nebuchadnezzar's band. But the cornett was doomed to destruction in the struggle for life. In 1662 Evelyn speaks of the disappearance of the cornett "which gave life to the organ." Lord Keeper North wrote, "Nothing comes so near, or rather imitates so much, an excellent voice as a cornett pipe; but the labour of the lips is too great and is seldom well-sounded." The cornett was given a place in the chorales of Bach and the operas of Gluck after it had become extinct in England.

The ba.s.s cornett was known as the serpent from its curved form, and this character was in fact necessary in order that the performer's hands might be nearer together. Mr Galpin writes:-"If not overblown it yields a peculiarly soft _woody_ tone which no longer has its counterpart in the orchestra." He quotes from Thomas Hardy's _Under the Greenwood Tree_, where the village shoemaker remarks, "There's worse things than serpents." Dr Stone (_Dictionary of Music_, 1883) wrote:-"There were till a few years ago two serpents in the band of the Sacred Harmonic Society, played by Mr Standen and Mr Pimlett." The serpent {92} was driven out of the orchestra by the Ophicleide, which again has been extinguished by the valved Tubas of Adolphe Sax.

Trumpet and Sackbut.

"The story of the trumpet is the story of panoply and pomp," says Mr Galpin, and goes on to explain how the trumpeters with drummers formed an exclusive guild. Trumpets served as war-like instruments, but also for domestic pomp. Thus twelve trumpets and two kettle-drums sounded while Queen Elizabeth's dinner was being brought in. That monarch had certainly no excuse for being late for her meals.

The trumpet was originally a long straight cylindrical tube, but as early as 1300 the tube was bent into a loop, thus combining length with handiness. This form of the instrument was known as a clarion, a word which has degenerated in our day into a picturesque word for a trumpet.

It was for the clarion that Bach and Handel wrote trumpet parts which, I gather, are almost unplayable on the modern instrument. The clarion seems to have been soon beaten in the struggle for life by the clarinet, "which, as its name implies, was considered an effective subst.i.tute for the high clarion notes."

The sackbut, _i.e._ trombone, is an important offshoot from the trumpet.

The essential feature of this splendid instrument is that the length of the tube can be altered at will. Thus the performer is not-like the trumpeter-confined to one series of harmonics, but can take advantage of a whole series of these accessory notes.

The Organ.

This is one of the most ancient of instruments. Thus in the second century before our era Ctesibius of Alexandria had a simple type of organ, in which the wind from the bellows was admitted at will into whistle-like tube by keys which the performer depressed with his fingers.

It is a remarkable fact that keys should afterwards have been replaced by c.u.mbersome _sliders_ which had to be pushed in and out to produce the desired note. But so it was, and the keyboard had to be rediscovered in the twelfth century. The keys were first applied to the little portatives, {94a} one of which is figured by Galpin, p. 221, where the organist works the wind supply with one hand and manipulates the keys with the other. In Galpin, p. 222, a monk is shown playing a simple organ of apparently two octave compa.s.s, while another tonsured person is blowing a pair of bellows, one with the left and the other with the right hand. Another artist is shown by Galpin, p. 226, from a thirteenth century Psalter, who is accompanying a player of the symphony (hurdy-gurdy). The bellows are blown by the feet of an a.s.sistant.

The regal, figured by Galpin at p. 230, was a simple form of organ in which the pipes were not of the whistle-type, but consisted princ.i.p.ally of reed-pipes.

Tabors and Nakers.

In my essay on war music {94b} I wrote of the band of a French regiment at the beginning of the war: "When the buglers were out of breath, the drums thundered on with magnificent fire, until once more the simple and spirited fanfare came in with its brave out-of-doors flavour-a romantic dash of the hunting-song, and yet with something of the seriousness of battle. . . . As I watched these men, so soon to fight for their country, I was reminded of that white-faced boy pictured by Stevenson, striding over his dead comrades, the roll of his drum leading the living to victory or death." I have ventured to quote the above pa.s.sage in ill.u.s.tration of Mr Galpin's striking remark that the drum has probably entered more largely than any other instrument into the destinies of the human race.

The historian of musical instruments in the far north has an easy task, since it appears that the Eskimoes confine themselves to the drum, which they sound on all possible occasions, from prosperous huntings to the death of a comrade.

The instruments of the cla.s.s here dealt with are divided into three types:-

(i.) The timbrel or tambourine, which is characterised by having only one membrane stretched on a shallow wooden frame.

(ii.) The drum with two membranes, one at each end of a barrel-shaped frame.

(iii.) The naker or kettle-drum, with a single membrane stretched over the opening of a hemispherical frame. The tambourine is an extremely ancient instrument since it was known in a.s.syria and Egypt as well as in Greece and Rome, and it is especially interesting to learn that the Roman tambourine had the metal discs which make so exciting a jingle in the modern instrument. The mediaeval tambourine also had what, in the case of the drum, is called the _snare_, which is a cord tightly stretched across the membrane, and gives a certain sting to instruments of this cla.s.s, but now only exists in the drum proper.

Drum.

An ancient Egyptian drum was discovered at Thebes. It was a true drum having a membrane at each end of the hollow cylinder which made the frame, and, what is more remarkable, it had the braces or system of cords by which we still tighten the drum-membranes.

The drum "suspended at the side of the player and beaten on one head only" became, with the accompaniment of the fife, the earliest type of military music. {96a} Mr Galpin concludes {96b} by quoting what Virdung (1511) had to say of drums: "I verily believe that the devil must have had the devising and making of them, for there is no pleasure nor anything good about them. If the noise of the drum-stick be music, then the coopers who make barrels must be musicians."

Kettle-drums. {96c}